A NEW HOPE: JÉRÔME VANDEWATTYNE

The small country of Belgium is currently the hotbed and home of the most thrilling and best genre cinema of Europe. Names like Bruno Forzani & Hélène Cattet (Amer, Laissez bronzer les cadavres), Fabrice du Welz (Alleluia) and Jonas Govaerts (Welp) have enriched Fantastic Film in recent years in original and, in the best sense, weird ways, and with their works they have landed at highly regarded international film festivals. And it appears that a younger colleague will very soon join this illustrious gathering. Only in his mid-twenties, Jérôme Vandewattyne is, as we see in his cinema, infatuated with the grubby, uncertain, uncategorizable films of the sixties and seventies that were collected at some point under the label cult and made exploitable. Traces and ghosts from the provocative cinematic worlds of John Waters, Russ Meyer and Lloyd Kaufman can be found in the shrill, frenetic and overdriven fifteen-minute film SLUTTERBALL, commissioned by the Brussels genre film festival BIFFF for its thirtieth anniversary. Fast, disorienting sequences with a twist in the direction of hallucination and transcendence are found even in the webclip series WHAT THE FAKE? with a cast made up entirely of teenagers. If there is any justice in the film world, then it must now, at the latest, pay attention to Jérôme Vandewattyne with SPIT’N’SPLIT. The delirious mockumentary was not only made with one of the coolest Belgian bands around, The Experimental Tropic Blues Band, on the road through half of Europe in gonzo style, but Vandewattyne’s predilection for synaesthetic excess also merges here for the first time with transgression attempts and a genre corset into an innovative, experimental trash-art bastard.